Proof - By Dick Francis Page 0,35

I didn’t know that the Arthur Lawrence Trent who owned that place had horses in training with Jack, and I didn’t know he was at the party. I didn’t know him by sight… and I didn’t know that he was one of the men we found dead. If I’d known he was going to be at the party I’d have got Jack or Flora to introduce me.’ He shrugged, ‘If and if.’

‘But you were… um… investigating him?’ I asked.

‘No,’ McGregor said pleasantly. ‘The person we suspected was an employee of his. A man called Zarac’

I’m sure my mouth physically dropped open. Gerard McGregor placidly finished paying the bill, glancing with dry understanding at my face.

‘Yes, he’s dead,’ he said. ‘We really are totally back at the beginning.’

‘I don’t consider,’ I said intensely, ‘that Zarac is a matter of no crocodiles.’

I spent most of Saturday with my fingers hovering over the telephone, almost deciding at every minute to ring Flora and ask her for Gerard McGregor’s number so that I could cancel my agreement for Sunday. If I did nothing he would turn up at two o’clock and whisk me off heaven knew where to meet his client, the one whose scotch had turned up on my tongue. (Probably.)

In the end I did ring Flora but even after she’d answered I was still shilly-shallying.

‘How’s Jack?’ I said.

‘In a vile temper, I’m afraid, Tony dear. The doctors won’t let him come home for several more days. They put a rod right down inside his bone, through the marrow, it seems, and they want to make sure it’s all settled before they let him loose on crutches.’

‘And are you all right?’

‘Yes, much better every day.’

‘A friend of yours,’ I said slowly, ‘came to see me. Er… Gerard McGregor.’

‘Oh yes,’ Flora said warmly. ‘Such a nice man. And his wife’s such a dear. He said you and he together had helped a good few people last Sunday. He asked who you were, and I’m afraid, Tony dear, that I told him quite a lot about you and then about everything that happened at the Silver Moondance, and he seemed frightfully interested though it seems to me now that I did go on and on a bit.’

‘I don’t think he minded,’ I said soothingly. ‘Um… what does he do, do you know?

‘Some sort of business consultant, I believe. All those jobs are so frightfully vague, don’t you think? He’s always travelling all over the place, anyway, and Tina… that’s his wife… never seems to know when he’ll be home.’

‘Have you known them long?’ I asked.

‘We met them at other people’s parties several times before we really got to know them, which would be about a year ago.’

‘I mean… has he always lived near here?’

‘Only about five years, I think. They were saying the other evening how much they preferred it to London even though Gerard has to travel more. He’s such a clever man, Tony dear, it just oozes out of his pores. I told him he should buy some wine from you, so perhaps he will.’

‘Perhaps,’ I said. ‘Er… do you have his telephone number?’

‘Of course,’ Flora said happily, and found it for me. I wrote it down and we disconnected, and I was still looking at it indeterminately at nine o’clock when I closed the shop.

‘I half expected you to cry off,’ he said, when he picked me up at two the next day.

‘I half did.’

‘But?’

‘Curiosity, I suppose.’

He smiled. Neither of us pointed out that it was curiosity that got the Elephant’s Child into deep trouble with the crocodiles in the Limpopo River, though it was quite definitely in my mind, and Gerard, as he had told me to call him, was of the generation that would have had the Just So Stories fed to him as a matter of course.

He was dressed that afternoon in a wool checked shirt, knitted tie and tweed jacket, much like myself, and he told me we were going to Watford.

I sensed a change in him immediately I’d committed myself and was too far literally along the road to ask him to turn back. A good deal of surface social manner disappeared and in its place came a tough professional attitude which I felt would shrivel irrelevant comment in the utterer’s throat. I listened therefore in silence, and he spoke throughout with his eyes straight ahead, not glancing to my face for reactions.

‘Our client is a man called Kenneth Charter,’ he said.‘Managing Director and Founder of Charter